Saturday, September 5, 2015

Hollow Man - Mark Pryor

Hollow Man

Mark Pryor

Seventh Street/Prometheus, Sep 1 2015, $15.95

ISBN: 9781633880863

The English solicitor Whitfield calls from Great Britain to inform
Dominic in Austin that his parents were electrocuted while checking storm
damage on the family farm. Having not
seen them in over a decade after being exiled at sixteen for shooting a man in
the face; Dominic struggles with his quivering mind’s pictures of what they
looked like. No funeral to arrange or
farm to sell, Dominic authorizes Whitfield to spread their ashes as his parents
wished while he remains in Texas.

Dominic knows he is a Hollow Man with no moral compass that he
conceals behind facades of normalcy like being a prosecutor and guitarist. However a demotion to the Juvenile Justice
Center angers Dominic, which makes it much more difficult to hide his
psychopathic tendencies. His friend
immigration lawyer Gus Cronstedt tells him about a heist of a client who
collects rents in cash only. As Gus
backs out of the planned robbery, Dominic recruits his computer savvy roommate
Tristan Bell and former cop turned security guard Otto Bland as his robbery
cohorts. “The best laid schemes of Mice and Men oft go awry” (Of Mice and Men by John
Steinbeck) as nothing works the way Dominic thought it would; leading to
two deaths and law enforcement seeking the bumbling trio.

As Hugo Marston (see The Reluctant Matador) takes a breather, Mark Pryor provides readers with
an awesome stand-alone suspense starring a macabrely fascinating amoral
protagonist. The diabolically cunning
and charming (that is his public mask) antihero turns the thriller into a superb
psychological crime drama as he and his teammates affirm the “truism” of
Murphy’s Law.